When it comes to sports, this is one of my favorite times of the year. Baseball is starting up, hockey is rolling towards the playoffs and the NCAA Tournament is right around the corner, March Madness indeed! We are about to witness millions of people go crazy over their favorite college hoops team (GO SPARTANS!). I could literally sit for days and watch every drama filled, buzzer beating, cinderella-slipper wearing moment of the tournament.
Everyone of us has some interest or activity that we are excited about, something that energizes and encourages us in everyday life. Something that you do regularly or something you may do just every now and then. Take a minute and think about some of the passions you have that get you fired up and excited.
Over the next month I want to focus on a topic that is one of the most important and one that carries the most opinions and stirs up emotions more than almost any other in our lives: WORSHIP. Worship is huge, because it has a great deal of importance both in this life and in eternity.
Worship can be defined as having an intense passion or respect for a person, place or a thing. Some people worship style, cars, money and just about any other thing you can think of. Worship is unavoidable in this life. But for today, I want to focus on what worship is not. In one statement it is simply this, worship is not created. We cannot generate worship or manufacture it. Worship is a natural extension of who we were created to be. It isn’t reserved just for super religious people, because worship can be given to an object just as easily as it can be given to God. In fact we are all worshippers, because God wired us to worship. It’s not a certain environment, not a certain style of music (new or old). In fact if you need the bright lights and loud guitars for you to think your worshipping, than you are simply worshipping worship. And the same goes if you think that worship can only be quiet or sung in King James English.
When you look at the world around you, you can’t help but see people worshipping. People cannot be separated from worship , because created us with worship as part of our DNA. God created us to be passionate about things, a natural need to give our worship to something. But if we are not worshipping God, we will begin to give our worship to something else. We cannot help but do this.
The saddest part about this is that so many of us in the church are doing this. We are wasting our worship. We give so much of what belongs to God to programs, philosophies, authors, musicians and the latest Christian trends. You might say, “I worship God. I worship Jesus. I worship at church.” But talk is cheap. The worship that is naturally part of us covers our entires lives.
The apostle Paul said that God commands us to repent of sharing our worship with anything or anyone other than God himself. Everywhere we go and everywhere we turn there are other gods competing to grab our attention and worship from the one true God. Satan’s motivation above everything else is to try to turn our eyes off of God, and onto other things and passions. He wants us to burn our energy up, to waste our worship. Because he knows that when we focus on God, make Him the object of all our passion and bow our knees in worship, then we will begin to see the life changing power of God at work in our lives and become even more passionate about our Father.
This is a call to examine your life. A call to declare war over our worship. It’s time that we remove all the idols, altars and shrines that we have set up in our lives and given priority to over God. It’s time to pray a high-risk prayer and say, “God, I want to serve You and worship You only.” Only than can we stop wasting our worship, and than we will be truly wired for worship towards God.
Resonant Love 